Fw: CAP SC wording

[Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz>]

Hi,
	Here is Eliot's draft text submission for the new sections in the Practices Guide.

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"*Distinguishing High-Priority CAP Alerts*

Some CAP implementors are seeking convergence on practices across alerting
authorities internationally for distinguishing a subset of CAP alerts that
are 'high-priority'. In this context. 'high-priority' alerts are those that
could trigger a siren or other highly intrusive method to command the
immediate attention of people at risk in the alerting area.

Agreed criteria for distinguishing high-priority alerts is important
because such alerts are typically due to a near-term life-critical
situation. Without such criteria, alerting authorities at the operational
level (fire chiefs, police chiefs, mayors...) would be more prone to
confusion and mistakes such as triggering sirens unintentionally or
neglecting to trigger sirens that should have been triggered. Crucial
implementation differences could also arise across alerting system
implementors (e.g., social media communicators, app developers, siren
programmers, cell phone services, television and radio broadcasters, among
many others...). Such differences would quickly lead to public confusion as
media transmission of any particular alert ends up being patchy, e.g. a
siren sounds but cell phones don't get SMS messages; crawl text shows on TV
but there is no radio announcement, some apps act on an alert while others
don't, etc.

As an example practice, CAP implementors in the United States adopted a
fairly simple criteria for designating an alert as high-priority in this
sense:

situations in which people need to act immediately or within the next hour,
in response to an extraordinary or significant threat, that is already
observed or is likely to occur

This criteria is implemented directly in CAP by selecting either of the top
two levels of Urgency, Severity, and Certainty (as defined in the CAP data
dictionary for those elements). This practice is further discussed in the GDPC
Guide for Identifying High Priority Public Warnings
<http://preparecenter.org/resources/universal-app-identifying-high-priority-public-warnings>.


Readers who are interested promulgating guidance on distinguishing
high-priority CAP alerts should contact the OASIS  EM-TC public comment
list.“

____________________

“*Cell Broadcast Complements a CAP-enabled Alerting System*

Alerting authorities in the United States and several other countries
disseminate high-priority CAP alerts so that they can be received by every
cell phone in the alerting area. This very useful dissemination method is
accomplished by use of "Cell Broadcast", a standard message delivery
service over cellular phone systems.

When Cell Broadcast is used for public alerting, the warning message goes
to each cellular base station (cell tower) in the alerting area. That base
station then sends the warning message to all cell phones in its range. The
warning message is delivered whether or not the phone owner subscribes to
the particular cellular service, and delivery works for plain cell phones
as well as smart phones. It is also important to note that the base station
sends the warning message *immediately* as a broadcast, which is much
faster and more reliable than calling perhaps thousands of individual cell
phones, one by one.

For these reasons, cell broadcast is ideal for severe emergencies,
particularly because in this siutation cellular message traffic is often
heavy and the cellular network itself may have been degraded by the
emergency. Delivery of warning messages via Cell Broadcast is relatively
straightforward in any alerting system that is CAP-enabled because the
information in a CAP message is structured for automated processing.

Readers who are interested in promulgating guidance on how Cell Broadcast
complements a CAP-enabled alerting system should contact the OASIS  EM-TC
public comment list."
____________________


-- 
Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz>